Since I had never seen Spirited Away before, I sat down to watch the movie with the monomyth in mind, and throughout the movie, I filled in the chart. I think that this affected the way I interpreted the movie, because instead of watching it for fun like I normally would, I watched it so I could analyze it. This difference in perspective forced me to really think about the plot of the movie on a deeper level than I normally would, but it also distracted me. Instead of just watching and really appreciating details of the movie, I was thinking about where each scene was supposed to go in the chart. Because my observations were happening as the movie was progressing, I kept going back and changing or questioning my chart, so the movie would better fit the monomyth's pattern. This made me question the concept of the monomyth as a tool to fit any story, anywhere, from any time period. Do all of these stories fit the monomyth because they actually follow the pattern, or do they all fit because we have a pattern and we put all stories into it?
One thing that I think is really interesting about the movie itself is that the monomyth can be applied to it in many different ways and many spaces on the wheel could be filled by multiple points. For example, we had several possible options for what the "boon" that Chihiro receives could be, and depending on perspective, they any of them or all of them could be correct. Not many other groups did their analysis this way, but I think that it can lead to an interesting discussion about the plot of a film. This also makes me question the monomyth, because if a story can have many different points of threshold or boon or apotheosis, then does it actually fit the pattern, where there is only one?
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I think that's a good point. I watched The Last Samurai, in which it was incredibly easy to interpret the various elements of Campbell's monomyth, so it became just an entertaining side-observation that I would make every so often. But with a movie that is more difficult or complex, it would require a lot more energy to do the interpretations properly, and I could see that becoming distracting and detracting from the movie-watching experience. Also, with a difficult movie I could see there being multiple interpretations for a single element, too.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you've said here, but I especially agree with what you said about having many options for one element. Spirited Away is a weird movie, and in order to have a basic understanding of the plot, I had to do a lot of research and watch the movie several times. Once I had developed an understanding of what was going on, it got a little easier, but there are a few particularly enigmatic characters that seemed to be able to fit into more than one element. No-Face's character is constantly changing, and Haku is pretty dynamic as well. Once I had done some research on what the characters represented and the subtleties of the movie, the task of applying the monomyth to Spirited Away became a lot less daunting.
ReplyDeleteI feel as though most movies are pretty straightforward when it comes to its application to the monomyth chart. I have seen part of Spirited Away however and I do see how it could have multiple interpretations of it. Did your group have troubles deciding what to put for each section of the chart? It would be interesting to compare all your different charts to see what each of you interpreted differently.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting point. I could see how tempting it would be to just write as the movie goes, and fill out the chart. The problem, like you said, was it was difficult to comprehend the movie as a whole, or even interperate it differently then you would have you watched it without recording every scene. This method could be easily used for simple movies that fill out the monomyth chart easily, such as Shrek, or many disney movies. More difficult story lines such as Memento was almost impossible to fill out during the movie, due to the movie being chronologically backwards. I think the best approach would be to watch the movie as you would as any other viewer, with the knowledge of how the storyline might go, and look back on the movie and figure it out. Rather than trying to figure it out during the movie, which can ruin the actual storyline for the viewer.
ReplyDeleteI think that in order to truly get the effect of the monomyth, you need to watch the movie, think about it, then fill in the chart. I agree that you could be easily distracted by trying to focus so much on writing in the chart that you might miss major points in the movie. I definitely agree that in many movies it is possible to apply the monomyth in different ways. In a way, you could apply a separate monomyth to multiple characters resulting in completely different charts. I found with my movie too that it caused me to think of it in a much deeper light than just a thriller. I think that the monomyth can be applied to the majority of movies, but there is definitely room left for ambiguity.
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